1) What brought you to your research subject? How did you come to discover the topic?

I became interested in efforts to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) while attending law school in the late 2000s. My plan was to become an environmental lawyer, but I was more interested in questions of justice and development that had compelled me since my college days as an anti-globalization protester. Questions like, what would the climate change mitigation efforts I was studying mean for poorer people? Knowing my interests, a professor suggested that I research REDD, which was quite new. The research was both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because REDD brought together such important questions of environmental change, poverty, and power. Frustrating because it was difficult to understand its impacts on people’s lives just by analyzing the plethora of reports and articles being written, a lot of which were pretty theoretical. The more I read, the less I felt I knew about its impacts, and the more I wanted to understand them myself. So, instead of becoming a lawyer, after graduating I began studying REDD in a PhD program, using my legal training to explore some of REDD’s juridical components. I decided to focus on Acre, Brazil’s REDD program because it is considered among the world’s most advanced2) Can you share a bit about your research methods and timeline for this project? What was the most difficult aspect of your research? What was the most satisfying aspect?

I conducted my primary field research for about a year in urban and rural locations in Acre. I also conducted research in other parts of Brazil, Indonesia, and the United States starting in 2011. In these locations, I worked with a variety of informants—smallholders and rubber tappers, policymakers and lawyers, technocrats, NGO folk, forest engineers, REDD project developers and their auditors, and critics of REDD. I used a variety of familiar ethnographic methods: semi-structured interviews, participant observation in meetings and day-to-day interactions, and document analysis. I’ve used my environmental legal training to understand legal components of Acre’s REDD program and its relationship with laws in other jurisdictions (i.e., in California, which is considering accepting Acreano carbon credits into its carbon market). I also served as a field research supervisor, collecting survey data from 200+ smallholders in Acre for the Center for International Forestry’s (CIFOR) Global Comparative Study on REDD+.

Working on an emergent, controversial, and politically prominent subject brought some difficulties. REDD is unstable and changing. Perhaps even more than for other subjects of anthropological inquiry, I can’t quite say what it really “is” in Acre because it is still being constructed. And whatever it becomes might not be called or considered to be REDD. Because the subject is controversial everywhere from Acre to academia, I was sometimes viewed with suspicion: Was I starting a REDD project or was I there to undermine REDD? Additionally, some informants wanted to know the utility of my research for addressing issues of deforestation and economic development. I was therefore compelled to continually consider an important question: does my work contribute to addressing climate change in a socially just way?

The fact that my research consistently raised this question also points to what has been most satisfying about this project. I worked with people for whom the forest holds a variety of meanings—financial, intellectual, spiritual, and/or aesthetic. They disagreed about how, why, and even whether the forest should be protected. What was deeply satisfying was to feel compelled by so many of them. Through my research, I came to know classic stereotypes—the deforesting smallholder, the greedy REDD developer, the lazy bureaucrat, the burnt-out NGO worker, the cynical activist—and appreciate them as multidimensional people doing their best in a difficult and imperfect world.

3) Your paper challenges the way many academics currently view neoliberal processes. Can you say more about the significance of your research in that regard? For example, are you making a larger comment to the discipline about contemporary state power in general or do you see events in your site as unique? (You can say more about your thinking in your last paragraph if that helps).

My paper challenges a dominant theme in scholarship and popular discourse on neoliberalism: that it necessarily entails an increase in inequality, often through a dismantling of state social welfare provision (e.g., Harvey 2007). Neoliberalism has supported these things in many cases. But its effects aren’t determined and it might be used to varying ends. For example, in my paper, I examine how REDD, sometimes seen as quintessentially neoliberal form of environmental protection, enables state social welfare provision in Acre, a place (like many in the Global South) that has never had a Keynesian welfare state. In that sense, my argument is neither a description of a unique case nor a characterization of state power more generally. Rather, I show the indeterminacy of apparently neoliberal processes by identifying the progressive potential within a prominent REDD program, a potential that might (but not necessarily) be identified and strengthened elsewhere as well.

One of the things I value most about anthropology is how it enables us to use human diversity to complicate accepted conceptual understandings and beliefs, our own included. Since the discipline’s inception, anthropologists have questioned Western narratives of things like property, kinship, and religion, expanding the dominant understanding of what these things can look like. As an economic doctrine, neoliberalism is categorically different. But approaching it as a coherent force may actually give it more power, as scholars like Timothy Mitchell (2002) and JK Gibson-Graham (2006) have argued about scholarship on capitalism. Other sorts of critique are also possible. Anthropologists, for example, have shown the contextually-specific range of “neoliberal” processes and policies (e.g., Kipnis 2008, Shrever 2008), as well as neoliberalism’s own progressive threads and potentials (Ferguson 2010, 2015; Collier 2011). I situate my work, which shows how the monetization of forest carbon is being used to support state social welfare provisioning, in this good company.

4) Relatedly, can you speak a bit more to the way you see your work articulating with ongoing critiques of REDD and carbon trading?

My research confirmed for me a basic anthropological insight that I mentioned above: things called by the same name—like neoliberalism, REDD, and “ecosystem services”—can look, and in fact be, quite different in different contexts. In other words, REDD programs may be connected through name and threads of theoretical origin (e.g., market-oriented environmentalism), but they change in traveling, morphed by the people and organizations that advance them, and by the histories and politics they encounter. This contrasts with critical work that discusses “REDD” and “carbon trading” as unified, singular phenomena. Additionally, unlike some other critiques, I do not try to assess whether or not REDD “works,” in the sense of reducing deforestation or greenhouse gas emissions through carbon trading. It may fail spectacularly at both. REDD might even be “dead” (see Fletcher et al. 2016) and its name soon discarded, but it or its descendants may still be socially important. In Acre, for example, REDD is shifting rural smallholder-state politics in ways that may be significant even if the term “REDD” fades (and some of my informants were already moving away from the term during my fieldwork).

To me, calling a policy “REDD” is the beginning of the most interesting part of the inquiry. I tried to begin with a sense of curiosity about what REDD, carbon trading, and payment for ecosystem service programs are and do in a specific place, like some other critical scholarship (e.g., McAffee & Shapiro 2010, Osborne 2011). Such fieldwork-based scholarship finds that these programs often work differently than they are supposed to in theory. The relevance of this scholarship isn’t limited to their contexts, however. Instead, such research points to the unexpected problems and progressive potentials that arise in the context of existing political struggles and land-use dynamics.

5) How do you situate your work within the anthropology of climate change?

Cultural anthropologists study climate change’s social importance in a few ways. Some focus on impacts, like rising sea levels and extreme weather events. Others look at how people understand and respond to climate change. My research targets the latter: I examine a climate change “mitigation” policy, rather than how climate impacts manifest in Acre.

My work shares some characteristics with other scholarship on the conceptualization of and responses to climate change. First, I am interested in how climate change is used to support certain figures, for people and places. Island nations, for example, become vulnerable victims (Moore 2010, Hughes 2013). Forested places like Acre, in contrast, are seen as both carbon sources and sinks. The people in them become climate change perpetrators or saviors, worthy of punishment or payment. These positions are not just passively received, I try to show, but are actively shaped and cultivated, in part because of the promise of payment.

A second component of the anthropology of climate change that I see in my work is a focus on nonclimatic effects. I do not try to assess the effectiveness of REDD in terms of reducing deforestation, but rather look at its social significance, for example in shaping rural politics. I also show continuities and disjunctures from past conservation, land use, and development policies and politics. Highlighting the endurance of such historical patterns—a knack of anthropology’s in general—is particularly important for the anthropology of climate change as repeating mistakes becomes more likely given the speed at which climate policies are being adopted and the breadth of their reach.

Finally, although my work does not make explicit policy assessments or recommendations, I grapple with the impact of my work outside of academia. This too is a component of the anthropology of climate change, I think, of working on a subject in which the stakes are particularly high.

6) Finally, what is your own personal relationship to activism in your research area? You may define activism and research area however you like.

My work identifies progressive potentials and pitfalls in programs like REDD that might be strengthened or avoided in a variety of contexts, including in Acre itself. This comes in part from my perspective that our world(s) are created from what we have already, rather than what we would like them to be. With its focus on historical and structural continuities, anthropology supports this perspective, I think. So REDD (or some future version of it), and/or other forms of market-based climate mitigation and adaptation policies, will likely be important for years to come. And we don’t know what these policies will look like or what their climatic and social impacts will be. There’s ample space for harm, but also for creativity. Perhaps market-based mitigation strategies can be made socially progressive so that climate change and our responses to it might support more just and livable communities. Contributing to this potential through my analysis is perhaps a form of activism. It differs from the activism of those who are stanchly against anything that resembles REDD. But the tensions and disagreements between these perspectives isn’t necessarily a problem. It might even constitute the path forward.

McAfee, Kathleen and Elizabeth N Shapiro. 2010. Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: Nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (3): 579-599.